発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken Archive

Abduzeedo

Timeless Unveils Interactive Web Design for Timeless Type

October 8Work

Timeless crafts an interactive web design for Timeless Type, pairing tactile 3D controls with a four-family variable font system. Digital type specimens…

Craft & material

Read at Abduzeedo ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Timeless Unveils Interactive Web Design for Timeless Type

Related

Gianni’s serves up a slice of bold, handmade design Mindsparkle Mag

Japan国立工芸館で「デザイン・クロニクル展」開催。工芸からモダン・デザインへとつづく100年の歩み AXIS

Fjällräven bets on the handmade with giant stitched banners by Miscellaneous Adventures Creative Boom

JapanAXISギャラリーで「旦 ASHITA」開催。錦山窯120周年、吉田幸央が描く工芸の次なる地平 AXIS

Accidental greenwashing – Chacho Puebla on the launch of his anti-greenwashing course Design Week

JapanAZUMA FARM Koiwai, a Private Forest Sauna Crafted for the Art of Bathing Pen